Imagine waiting for a website to load. You’re waiting… and waiting…and waiting. Would you stick around? If you won’t, neither will your visitors. A slow-loading website is one of the top reasons for people to leave a site. Your visitors will leave before even seeing the content on your website. Every second of delay costs you potential customers, subscribers, and sales. Yet, many website owners don’t realize how small issues behind the scenes can slow down their site.
Let’s look at three possible culprits that could be costing you traffic and how to fix them.
1. Keep your site updated
Updating your site’s plugins, themes, and content management system is essential for the security and performance of your site. Every update includes critical improvements to address bugs, patch security holes, and site speed. When falling behind with updates, your site can become unstable and slow. Your site may seem fine, but under the surface, your site is suffering.
2. Ditch the attachment pages
WordPress automatically generates attachment pages when you upload a media file. These pages contain the media file and some metadata about the media file. However, they contain duplicate content, which negatively affects your SEO. Visitors may also land on these pages by mistake and leave when they can’t find any useful information. To fix this, disable the attachment pages in your site’s settings. Doing so will improve both your site’s speed and SEO.
3. Optimize crawl settings
Search engines use bots to crawl and index your site. If your crawl settings are not optimized, the bots can overwhelm your server. They might index irrelevant content or visit your site too often, leading to a higher load for your server. This results in a slower experience for your visitors. By optimizing your crawl settings, you allow the bots to only crawl and index the right pages. This will prevent unnecessary load on your server and improve your site’s speed.
Flag and fix
These three issues often fly under the radar, but they could have a large impact on your site performance. Progress Planner monitors and flags these hidden traffic killers on your site for free. With the help of Ravi’s Recommendations, you can solve these issues so you don’t lose visitors due to a slow site.
Discover all site speed secrets
Want to improve your site speed and stay ahead of the curve? Join our free masterclass, Site speed secrets (that Google and ChatGPT actually care about), on May 22nd and learn more about how you can improve your site speed.
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